My wife and I got serious about buying a sailboat after we showed up to visit my father at the care home one afternoon and found him on the floor, his torso in the hallway but his legs still stubbornly in the bathroom. Another stroke, another nasty irony: his Ph.D., at the University of Chicago almost sixty years before, had been on blood flow in the brain, exactly the thing that had gone wonky and put him on the floor. Watching your father learning to crawl is a powerful argument for starting on your personal list of things to do before you die. It wasn’t his first fall; as it turned out, it was actually his last.
We bought Vera only partially because of my father’s decline and the warning it carried; the other reason was an exhausted border collie in Sointula, on Malcolm Island. This place lies a few miles off Port McNeill, at the northern end of the tricky passage between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia. Hatsumi and I had crossed on the car ferry from Port McNeill on a whim during a mid-summer week negotiated away from responsibilities in Victoria, where my father was now a tottering time bomb.
The border collie found us on the beach below the lighthouse at Pulteney Point, a crushed-shell spit where the wind that had barrelled up Johnstone Strait tore at your hat and whipped the sea white. Just looking at the water made my heart turn over. I’d never go out there. The dog ran a perfunctory circle around our feet, flopped down in the sand, and hung its tongue out. His owners waved at us and started walking over.
“I don’t know how to ask you this,” the man said. Curly hair stuck out from beneath a blue ball cap. “Is that by any chance your car in the parking lot?”
His name was Scott, his wife was Debbie, and they had walked all the way from Sointula, a distance of ten miles. We loaded the dog into the back. They were embarrassed and apologetic. The dog began to snore.
They had sailed up from Seattle. Today was too windy to leave Malcolm Island; a walk had been the obvious diversion. We fishtailed around a gravelly corner. I had no idea how windy was too windy. One look at Johnstone Strait from the lighthouse had been enough. I might as well have been out there under Frou-Frou’s foredeck.
“Can we see your boat?” I asked.
Their boat, Viva, was tied up at the marina, one of only a few pleasure craft, even at the height of summer. The dog woke up long enough to jump gracefully aboard and into the cockpit, where he curled up and went back to sleep. I wondered if I should take my shoes off. I hadn’t been on a sailboat for twenty-five years.
“Glass of wine?” Debbie asked. She went down below, and I looked around the cockpit.
Sailboats had changed. What on earth were all those gauges? Even the old-fashioned things, like the winches, looked different from the ones I had used to wrestle in the jib sheets on the family boat: they were bigger and shinier, with a crown of grooved teeth that completely baffled me. (I later learned they were self-tailing winches, a wonderful invention that lets you crank with both hands while the toothy bit grabs the rope.) When I peered below, I could see teak woodwork, carpet, an inviting settee, and a light-flooded galley where Debbie was doing something with cheeses. We sat in the cockpit and ate off a varnished table that folded out across from the enormous steering wheel. I had never touched a steering wheel in a sailboat; in my experience, sailboats had tillers. A tiller was the essence of sailing, the varnished wooden wand that connected you straight to the rudder and thus to the water. A tug on the tiller was like a tug to a horse’s reins, a communication with something living. What would a wheel feel like — driving a truck?
Outside the marina, the wind whipped Johnstone Strait, but you couldn’t feel much where we were sitting. I liked Scott and Debbie, their openness and the way they didn’t allow the grandness of their boat to rub off on them. They gave us a business card with their names and a little picture of their boat, a practice I would later learn was de rigueur among serious cruisers. The dog didn’t look up when we left. When we got to the top of the ramp, I caught Hatsumi’s sleeve, and we turned to look out over the marina.
“We should get a boat too,” I said. “To go with all my dad’s stuff.”
“Sure,” she said.
Neither of us dreamed we would be back — in our own boat.
***
Hatsumi grew up in Tokyo, in what she calls her “hometown” of Kugayama. As far as I can make out, there are about a thousand of these hometowns in the city. If you walk one train stop from Kugayama, dodging bicycles on the path that follows the concretized banks of the Kandagawa River, you come to Inokashira Park. It’s one of the livelier parks in Tokyo, especially in the spring when people line up hours in advance to claim a spot to spread their blankets, open hampers, and consume staggering amounts of alcohol to welcome the sakura — Japan’s spectacular cherry trees — back into bloom. Inokashira is one of the best places in Tokyo to get sozzled and serenade the cherry blossoms. If you’re watching a movie filmed in Tokyo, chances are pretty good there’ll be a scene in Inokashira Park.
The closest ocean is Tokyo Bay, another hour by train. There are few pleasure boats in Tokyo Bay, but Inokashira Park has two kinds on its little manmade lake. Courting couples giggle and flail in clunky rowboats, occasionally colliding beneath the overhanging branches of willows, and the dock at one end of the elegant curved bridge corrals a gaggle of blinding white pedal boats in the shape of swans. You and your partner sit in the swan’s fat body and pedal like maniacs, as though climbing an impossibly steep hill, and the swan goes around in slow circles, an icebreaker in a sea of cherry petals.
So, my wife’s entire nautical experience, until our glass of wine on Scott and Debbie’s yacht, was aboard a large mechanical bird.
“Don’t worry,” I told her, “in our family, we boated. I know all about sailing.”
A few months after our visit to Sointula, I called Hatsumi over to my computer. “Look at this,”
She glanced at the screen. “It’s a boat,” she said. “So?”
“You agreed. That we should buy one. You don’t remember?”
“I thought you were kidding.”
“So did I,” I said. “Until I saw this one.”
***
We drove out to the sales dock the next day. It was raining and cold and Jade Myst looked miserable, the lines led aft along her deck gone green with algae and a deflating rubber dinghy draped over the dock like a Dali watch. But even neglected and in the drizzle, she was beautiful: dark green with massive bronze portholes, lots of teak, and a serious, seagoing flare to her bows.
“Big,” said Hatsumi.
“Thirty-four feet,” I read off the description printed on the brokerage card that dangled crookedly from a lifeline. “Same size as our family’s last boat. No problem. But that name has to go. Jade Myst? Sounds like a stripper.” The broker’s write-up trumpeted the name of the boat’s designer and builder but neither meant any more to me than the white radar dome twenty feet above my head. Everything was above my head. The asking price was astronomical, which probably explained the algae on the deck.
“I’m cold,” said Hatsumi. A seagull landed on the radar dome and went “Buk-buk-buk.”
We remortgaged our home and made an offer. “Subject to survey,” the broker, Allan James, had insisted. “And sea trial, of course.” Allan was about my age, a worried-looking New Zealander in sweatpants, running shoes, and a blue toque. I liked him; his black humour and perpetual air of martyrdom over the inanities of the boat-buying public appealed to me immediately.
We walked down to the sales dock for the short trip across the harbour to the “travel lift,” a monstrous wheeled gallows which would pluck Jade Myst out of the water so that the marine surveyor could do what he had to do. I had no idea what he had to do.
“Sailing all my life,” I mentioned as we walked down the ramp. It was still raining. Allan hopped into the cockpit and did things to the engine. “I’ll take her,” he said. We were already moving by the time I jumped on. Allan brought the boat smoothly to the dock at the marine yard, working levers and spinning the big stainless steering wheel so that the boat seemed to levitate sideways into the tight space. I really wanted to ask Allan how he did that thing with the engine and the steering wheel, but he was gone already, up the ramp to the yard office, and someone else was holding out a wet hand.
“Bob Whyte,” said a tall, bookish-looking man with a neat grey moustache. He held a clipboard. “Can we get out of the rain?”
“Be my guest,” I said to the surveyor. That moustache was a good sign. Only anal-retentive people wore moustaches like that. If anything was wrong with Jade Myst, Bob would find it. We clambered down slippery wooden steps and looked around. Jade Myst smelled musty, a house from which the family had long departed. Everything was teak; it was like descending into a showroom for Scandinavian furniture. Daunting-looking electronics were recessed neatly into bulkheads.
“Bigger than my last boat,” I said.
Bob Whyte pulled out a pocket flashlight, clamped it in his teeth, and dropped to his knees. He yanked out a trapdoor. “Might as well start in the bilge,” he said and stuck his head in like an ostrich. I looked at his thin buttocks and the soles of his oxfords for a while and then went back out into the cockpit and started pulling things out of the lockers: half-empty engine oil containers, a dampish pair of blue coveralls, stained life jackets, and assorted lengths of hose. I rejoined Bob and found a wobbling bead of water hanging to the underside of the plexiglass hatch in the cabin roof.
“Got a leak here,” I said.
Bob’s checklist had begun to accumulate ticks. He snorted. “You’re lucky. Usually, those ones are right over your berth.” He didn’t make a tick.
After that, I kept my mouth shut while Bob methodically sounded the rest of the boat, inching along the deck like a man checking for mines, tapping the fibreglass with a rubber mallet and cocking his head to listen for the telltale sound of delaminated layers. Allan rematerialized, untied the boat, and eased her between the two canvas slings that dangled from the travel lift like enormous rubber bands. One went under the bow, the other was tugged beneath the stern, then a cautious revving of the travel lift’s diesel and Jade Myst exited the water vertically to hang, dripping, in the frame of the huge machine. There was much more of her underwater than I had imagined.
Bob went over all of her considerable underbelly with his little hammer. I took out a credit card and began chipping at the barnacles on her propeller until Allan nudged me aside to screw a shiny new zinc anode onto the shaft. Bob peered around the curve of the hull, still tapping. “Don’t forget to paint it,” he said.
Did one paint zincs?
“You bet,” I said.
“I was kidding,” he said.
It started to hail. I ducked beneath the curve of the hull and stood next to the propeller as the concrete slowly whitened to outline the shape of our new boat.
Bob gave Jade Myst a clean bill of health, but there were more hoops to jump through. The next was the sea trial, when the prospective owners get to try the boat out on the water, just to be sure. Ours was no more than a slow loop around the bay in a dead calm, during which I was mostly concerned with hiding how much of sailing I’d forgotten. That was farcical, I thought, not knowing that the real sea trial would come four years later.
***
Boat names are important. I was sure Jade Myst should be renamed Ima Kara, an expression I first heard when I was hiking up a mountain in the Japan Alps, before Hatsumi, before boating. It was cold. I was labouring. A middle-aged man wearing spotless white gloves and wielding hiking poles appeared out of the mist. I stood aside to let him pass. But he stopped and grinned.
“Ima kara,” he said. Which means “this is just the beginning.”
But ima kara would be useless for radio communication in Canada. I’d have to spell it out every time, I imagined the Coast Guard operator pushing the headphone harder into his ear and waving his hand for silence, writing it down and scratching his head: India-Mike-Alpha-Kilo . . . it would never work. One day, my wife announced the problem was solved.
“Your mother spoke to me last night,” Hatsumi said. My mother had been dead for five years. “She asked if we would name the boat after her.”
“Sounds right to me,” I said.
But when we called on the Register of Vessels, “Vera” turned out to be a popular boat name; Vera II and Vera III were already bobbing around out there somewhere. Cathy Kimoto in the registry office shook her head as she went through the list. It began to look like we were back to Ima Kara.
“Wait,” she said suddenly, flipping back a page. “Vera, just plain Vera. Here it is, but it’s reserved.” She ran her finger down the fine print. “Aha. The guy’s time ran out. You can have it if you take it now.” She dug under the counter for a form.
When Allan called and said he needed a certified cheque, we finally realized that we very nearly owned a large boat. We went to see the notary. Her office was a chaos of papers, piled, peeking out from folders, settled in uncertain stacks on the floor. She sifted through them, clucking. “You know what ‘boat’ stands for, of course?” she said, her head between her knees.
Hatsumi and I looked at each other and a small dog wandered in to sniff at our feet.
“Bring On Another Thousand.” The notary surfaced, red-faced, and waved a document at us. “Sign here.”
The next day was moving day, to the permanent space we’d reserved ten miles south, down Haro Strait. The first thing I did when we stepped aboard our new boat was hang over the side and laboriously scrape off four vinyl Jade Mysts with a putty knife. She was Vera now. I dug out the key, opened the engine seacock the way I’d seen the broker do, switched on the batteries, and pushed the starter. Hatsumi seemed frozen on the dock, and when the engine fired and cooling water shot out the stern, she jumped back.
“Sailing all my life, remember?” I looked up encouragingly and wrestled with dock lines that were stiff as boards. “Although Sidney has changed a bit since I was here last.”
In thirty years, the foreshore around Sidney had become a nautical parking lot. The chart looked like a map for a new subdivision. I hadn’t looked at a chart for a long time, and I turned it this way and that while the Yanmar diesel hawked and spat against the wharf. “Quit dithering,” it seemed to be saying. “Can’t you even find your way out of a marina?”
When we finally pushed off, the channels on the chart were replaced by a maze of navigational spars and buoys. “Red right returning” was all I could remember: keep the red marker on your right when entering a harbour. But there were many harbours here. Within seconds, the depth sounder showed five feet. Five feet was exactly Vera’s draft. I threw the engine into reverse and sand clouds boiled up around the stern, as though we had disturbed a sleeping sea monster. I headed straight for the fuel dock, channels and charts be damned.
“Stand on the bow,” I told Hatsumi. “With the line, the line.” She glared and shrugged. What was a “line” to her? It was what anybody else would sensibly call a rope.
“One of these,” I yelled, waving the stern line at her. By the simple act of taking the wheel of a boat, I seemed to have become my father. A teenager on the fuel dock watched us come on, expressionless. As we nosed in, I tried what Allan had so effortlessly done: put the engine into reverse. The stern walked rapidly away from the dock. We hurled the lines at the kid and let him reel us in. When I jammed the fuel nozzle into the filler hole and pulled the trigger, Vera burped a foul splash of diesel into my face.
We passed Zero Rock on the trip down Haro Strait. It was a glorious, calm spring day, and we broke out the sandwiches as a colony of seals watched us chug past. I suppose they were the great-great-great-grandchildren of the ones who had peered indifferently at Frou-Frou and her frightened crew. I decided not to tell Hatsumi about the time I had been here forty years before.
Oak Bay, our destination, was another two hours down the road. When we began our way through the maze of rock and kelp beds outside the marina, Vera seemed to expand, her keel lengthening as the depth sounder’s little grey numbers clicked backward. Docking and undocking, I’d read somewhere, were considered the most stressful part of boating. Now my bladder was confirming it. I wanted desperately to pee, but I hadn’t figured out the marine toilet yet.
The boat slips, from water level, didn’t look anything like the neat diagram in the marina office where we’d put down our deposit a week before. I’d overshot the Sidney fuel dock completely — how was I ever going to turn Vera up one of these tiny cul-de-sacs and bring her to a safe stop? As we closed in, I could see movement. One man got slowly out of his own boat and began to stroll with us, keeping pace. Two docks over, a heavyset fellow in shorts had begun to run, his sandals flapping. Vera and her petrified crew came on. A kneeling woman dropped her paintbrush and took off like a sprinter. By the time Vera had more or less turned the corner into her new slip, the three Samaritans were waiting for us, breathing heavily, arms outstretched.
“Just throw us your lines,” they said.